Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Notes from Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

October 30, 2021 – 8:19 am

P. 18 “The Cambrian period has generally been called the “age of invertebrates”. That’s certainly not because anyone sought to glorify our invertebrate ancestry. It’s simply an observation that we didn’t initially see any of our vertebrate ancestors in fossils from Cambrian layers. Notice that we didn’t bcall it the “age of arthropods” or the “age of trilobites”, either of which would be apt. Calling it the “age of invertebrates” is a bit like calling it the “age of no humans”. The name subtly derides the success of arthropods by noting the absence of vertebrates rathar than touting the evolution of exoskeletons. But subsequently we did discover our likely vertebrate ancestor in Cambrian times, and what a humbling event that was. A small creature called Pikaia was discovered in the 515-million-year-old Burgess Shale fossils of Canada. Pikaia was a mere one and a half inch long worm-like creature that burrowed in bottom sediments. She was soft-bodied, but did have an internal supporting structure, a primitive notochord, the ancestral structure of a vertebral column. Pikaia is now regarded as the most likely common ancestor of fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals. But she was such a modest ancestor that nobody lobbied for a renaming of the Cambrian as the “age of Pakaia.. P. 19 “in the waters above, along cruised animals like Anomalocaris, a three-foot-long nightmarish predatory arthropod with long spiny feeding appendages. Anomalocaris paddled along in Cambrian seas, picking off whatever small animals it could catch – do doubt feasting on lots of trilobites. From time to time, Anomalocaris no doubt swooped down to pick off a tender Pikaia for dinner… there is evidence that some trilobites may have been predatory … but still, if Cambrian trilobites had become extensively predatory, then it’s exceedingly unlikely we would be here to pierce together this story.”

P. 71 “Examples of paleopteran insects (a term that means “old wings”), mayflies are among the oldest surviving insects with the most ancient sort of wing design. … a relict that developed flight about 330 million years ago in the Carboniferous times. .. The front wings are much larger than the back and provide most of the lift for flight. All four wings are simple, however, in that they are capable of moving only up and down: mayflies don’t have the ability to flex and twist their wings at the base, as most modern insects are able to do… Mayflies are not very strong or adept fliers. They can dod little more than flutter their wings and drift and glide in easy patterns. Birds catch them easily, and fish eat their fill as mayflies land on water. Yet all the predators in the neighbourhood can’t make a dent in a mayfly swarm… Immediately after mating, the female flies back to the lake, then lands and floats on the surface. If she is lucky enough not to be eaten by a fish, the mother mayfly quickly dumps her eggs into the water as she dies. The eggs sink to the bottom and the cycle of death and rebirth is repeated, just as it has been for 320 million years.”

P. 75 “In the early Carboniferous, most of today’s macroscopic and microscopic consumers of dead wood had not yet evolved. There were no birds, mammals, bees, wasps, bark beetles, wood-boring beetles, bark lice, termites or ants. Moreover, during the Devonian and Carboniferous times, plants became very tall by producing cellulose and lignin, which are very difficult for animals to digest. None of the earliest invests were able to digest raw wood as well. The giant Carboniferous horsetails, like modern horsetails, toughened their vascular tissues with large amounts of silica, making them virtually indigestible. So the late Devonian and Carboniferous really were special for their excess production of plant materials, not only because the moist climate and high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide favoured plant growth, but also because plants were able to produce more biomass than the herbivores could consume, for millions of years. The first important insect wood consumers – the wood roaches – did not appear until the Late Carboniferous. They were followed by the appearance of bark live and the diversification of wood-boring beetles in the PErmian. Over time, increasingly more complex communities of wood consumers evolved, and the global bulk production of plant materials of the Carboniferous has never been repeated.”

P. 87 During the Late Carboniferous, the giant griffenflies started chasing a new kind of insect that was tasty but harder to catch than the old net-winged ones. Neoptera, or the new-winged insects, were faster fliers and they had an original trick made possible by tiby articulating skeletal plates, called axillary, sclerites, in the membrane near their wing base. These allowed directional wing movements … they could twist their wings at the base, fold them back over their body, and put them away, making the neoptera much smaller than the older insects, which held their wings constantly outstretched, kitelike. … some were quick on their feet too. Quicky after landing, they would deftly fold their wings and run under a leaf or into cracks and crevices, making themselves tough targets for the air dragons. This was such a successful adaptation that before you could say “cockroach”, the tropical world was infested with them. Several groups of new-winged insects appeared during the Carboniferous, but the roaches (order Blattaria) were by far and away the most successful.. BY the Late Carboniferous there were more than 800 species, and they made up about 60% of the known Carboniferous insects… in terms of species diversity, we should probably call the Carboniferous period the “age of roaches”.

P. 90 “The wood roaches evolved a symbiotic relationship with their gut microorganisms and became the first effective macroconsumers of dead wood. The roaches in turn were the most abundant food source for a host of predators, including scorpions, spiders, centipedes, fish, amphibians, reptiles and the flying air dragons. So with the onset of the roaches an important turn occurred in the cycling of organic molecules. More biomass from plant material escaped the geological cycles of sedimentation and rock formation, and was cycled back into the living world by small animals. The great coal age was coming to an end.”

P. 114 “”Perhaps we can pick one singular moment when the Paleozoic era came to an end. I’d choose the particular day when the final trilobite died. What other creature better symbolises the entire era than the tribolute. Their reign in the oceans lasted for more than 300 million yeas, but some 252 million years ago, on a cloudy morning perhaps, the last one stopped feeding in a shallow tidal pool. Her body floated to the surface, and the retreating tide washed it ashore along with other trilobite carcasses…. There were no birds on that lonely beach, but there was a scurry of small feet,, as first one cockroach, then another, found the castaway body and consumed it. Maybe a lone beetle, preening its antennae on a log nearby, briefly flew down to inspect the scene and partake in the feast. Then it turned, unfolded its wings, and buzzed clumsily into the forest.”

P. 142 “Termites are often regarded as social cockroaches… it is generally agreed that termites evolved from roachlike ancestors, The key to termite behaviour and existence is the their ability to 

Digest cellulose from woody plants. Like their near cousins the wood roaches, they accomplished this difficult fear by housing symbiotic organisms in their digestive tracts. Like all other insects, they have an external skeleton, and their foregut and hindgut are lined with skeletal materials., Therefore, when they periodically molt their skeletons, termites lose their symbionts as well, and they must acquire new ones or else they will starve to death. They get their symbiotic gut microorganisms by a process called anal trophylaxis – literally by earting the feces of other termits.. Without ti some of the world’s most impressive and influential societies might never have evolved… solves another serious problem of subsisting in large societies: sewage removal.. Termites avoided all of this not only by eating their feces but also by using it to build tunnels and arches within their nests.”

P. 156 “The flowering plants, the blossom and fruit-producing organisms known to botanists as angiosperms, may have first evolved in the Jurassic period or earlier, but they were initially rare woody shrubs restricted to wet forest habitats. We have fossil flower pollen dating from the Early Cretaceous, 134 million years ago, and fossil leaves and flowers dating to 124 million years ago, and we know that by 120 million years ago the first angiosprems, including such recognisable species as water lillies and magnolias, quickly radiated and diversified. By the Middle Creatacsous, and on to the present day, angiosperms had become the dominant plant species… sweet nectar and nutritious pollen allowed flowers – and insects – to overrun the planet. Plants produce them in sacrificial abundance, enough to feed ravenous hordes of flies, beetles, wasps and moths … until the Cretaceous, their distribution was limited mostly by the constraints of wind pollination. But with the insects’ assistance – and thanks to the energetics of insect flight – plants at this time could spread their genetic material over long distances. Now they could exist as widely dispersed populations, scattered in forests with little wind movement.”

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Notes from Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI

September 2, 2021 – 7:41 pm

p. 13 “The underlying visions of the AI field do not come into being autonomously, but instead have been constructed from a particular set of beliefs and perspectives. The chief designers of the contempoary atlas of AI are a small and homogenous group of people, based in a handful of cities, working in an industry that is currently the wealthiest in the world. Like medieval European mappae mundi, which illustrated religious and classical concepts as much as coordinates, the maps made by the AI industry are political interventions, as opposed to neutral reflections on the world.”

p. 16 Since antiquity, the business of mining has only been profitable because it does not have to account for its true costs: including environmental damage, the illness and death of miners, and the loss to the communities it displaces. In 1555, Georgius Agricola, known as the father of mineralogy, observed that “it is clear to all that there is greater detriment from mining than the value of the metals which the mining produces.”

p. 31 The mining that makes AI is noth literal and metaphorical. The next extractivism of data mining also encompasses and propels the old extractivism of traditional mining. The stack required to power artificial intelligence systems goes well beyond the multilahered technical stack of data modeling hardware, srevers and netwroks.. reaches into capital, labor and Earth’s resources… the cloud is the backbone of the artificial intelligence industry, and its made of rocks and lithium brine and crude oil”

p. 35 According to the computer manufacturer Dell, the complexities of the metals and mineral supply chain pose almost insurmountable challenges to the prodiction of conflict-free electronics components. The elements are laundered through such a vast number of entities along the chain that sourcing their provenance proves impossible 0 or so the end-product manufacturers claim, allowing them a measure of plausible deniability for any exploitative practices that drive their profits.”

p. p. 38 At the end of the 19th century, a particular Southeast Asian tree called the laquium gutta became the center of a cable boom. These trees, found mainly in Malaysia, produce a milky white natural latex called hutta-percha… rapidly became the darling of the engineering world … the solution to the problem of insulating undersea telegraphic cables to withstand harsh and varying conditions on the ocean floor. The twisted strands of copper wire needed four layers of the soft, organic tree sap to protect fhem from water intrusion and carry their electrical currents… The historian John Tully describes how local Malay, Chinese, and Dayak workers were paid little for the dangerous work of felling the trees and slowly collecting the latex. … as media scolar Nicole Starosielski writes, “Military strategists saw cables as the most efficient and secure mode of communication with the colonies – and, by implication, of control over them…. The jungles of Malaysia and Singapore were stripped: by the early 1880s the Palquium gutta had vanished.In a last-ditch effort to save their supply chain, the British passed a ban in 1883 to halt harvesting the latex, but the tree was all but extinct.”

p. 8 I argue that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructure, logistics, histories and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensivetraining with large datasets or pre-defined rules and rewards. In fact, artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much wider set of political and social structures. And due to the capital required to build AI at scale and the ways of seeing that it optimizes, AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominent interests. In this sense, artificial intelligence is a registry of power.”

p. 42 ” Strubell’s team found that running only a single NLP [natural language processing] model produced more than 660,000 pounds of carvon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime (including manufacturing) or 125 roundtrip flights from New York to Beijing.”

p. 56 Instead of asking whether robots will replace humans, I’m interested in how humans are increasingly treated like robots and what this means for the role of labour.. people are often performing rote tasks to shore up the impresssion that machines can do the work.”

p. 63 the experiences of crowdworkers who perform the repetitive digital tasks that underly AI systems, such as labelling thousands of hoursof training data and reviewing suspicious or harmful content. Workers do the repetitive tasks that backstop claims of AI magic, but the rarely receive credit for making the systems function.”

p. 76 Dominos Pizza has added to its kitchens machine -vision systems that inspect a finished pizza to ensure the staff made it according to prescribed standards. Surveillance apparatuses are justified for producing inputs for algorithnic scheduling systems that further modulate work time, or to glean behavioural signals that may correlate with signs of high or low work performance, or meerely sold to data brokers as a form of insight”

p. 159 Given that facial expressions are culturally variable, using them to train machine learning systems would inevitably mixtogether all sorts of different contexts, signals and expectations.

p. 173 None of these serious questions about the basis for Ekman’s claims have stopped his work from attaining a priileged role in current AI applications. Hundreds of papers cite Ekman’s view of interpretable facial expressions as tought it wer unproblematic fact, despite decades of scientific controversy. Few computer scientists have even acknowledged this literature of uncertainty”.

p, 174 WWht, with so many criticisms, has the approach of “reading emotions” from the face endured? .. we can begin to see how military research funding, policing priorities and profit motives have shaped the field…theories seemed ideal for the emerging field of computer vision because they could be automated at scale… powerful institutional and corporate investments in the validity of Ekman’s theories or metholodogies. Recognizing that emotions are not easily classified, or that they’re not reliably detectable from facial expressions, could undermine an expanding industry… the more complex issues of context, conditioning, relationaity and cultural factors are hard to reconcile with the current disciplinary approaches of computer science or the ambitions of the commercial tech sector. “

p. 206 when AI systems are deployed as part of the welfare state, they are used primarily as a way to surveil, assess, and restrict people’s access to public resources rather than as a way to provide for greater support… Michigan … “a matching algoriyjm be used to implement the state’s ‘fugitive felon’ policy, which sought automatically the disqualify indvidiuals from food assistance based on outstanding felony warrants. Between 2012 and 2015, mthe new system inaccurately matched from than 19,000 Michigan residents and automatically disqualified each of these from food assistance… in essence these systems are punitive, designed on a threat-targetting model.

p. 211 ARtificial intelligence is not an objective, universal, or neutral computational technique that makes determinations without human direction. Its systems are embedded in social, political, cultural and economic worlds, shaped by humans, institutions and imperatives that determine what they do and how they do it. They are designed to discriminate, to amplify hierarchies, and to encode narrow classifications. When applied in social contexts such as policing, the court system, health care and education, they can reproduce, optimize and amplify existing structural inequalities. This is no accident: AI systems are built to see and interven in the world in ways that primarily benefit the states, insutitutions and corporations that they serve.”

p. 226 What happens … if we begin with the commitment to a more just and sustainable world? How can we intervene to address interdependent issues of social, economic and clamte injustice. Where does technology serve that visions. And are there places where Ai should not be used, where it undermines justice? This is the basis of a renewed politics of refusal – opposing the narratives of techological inevitability that says ‘If it can be done, it will be.’ Rather than asking where Ai will be applied, merely because it can, the empasis should be on why it ought tho be applied … we can question the idea that everything should be subject to the logics of statistical prediction and profit accumulation, what Donna Haraway terms “the informatics of domination”.

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Podcast: Medieval eastern medicine

August 28, 2021 – 8:02 am

Another fascinator from the New Books Network: Goldsmith’s academic Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim on her new book ReOrienting Histories of Medicine – “it’s been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world”.

We think of Mongol period as of desctruction, but – what a great setting for historical novel, but Yoeli-Tlalim tells of the now Iranian city of Tabriz, the Ilkhanid Mongol court deliberately set up an intellectual hub, drawing in scholars from far afrield, where knowledge from Tibetan medicine was exchanged with “Islamic medicine”, both having been informed by Greek and Roman medicine. The city had active contacts with Byzantium and the Chinese court, and also with India. It was also a centre for astonomers and agronomists.

The author also makes an interesting point about the “mythical” elements in ancient medical texts. Rather than dismissing them, ask “what are they trying to tell us” – lots of understanding of the body, the nature of an individual etc can be gained from taking seriously. And divination or “magic” is a way of making a decision when you don’t have enough “scientific” knowledge to make a choice. And “superfoods” go a long way back – see triphala.

Talks also of Uighur medicine, from a document found in Turfan/Turpan.

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Notes from Crucible: The Year that Forged our World

August 11, 2021 – 4:53 pm

“In the Philippines, which gained independence from the US in 1946 and gained $620 million aid package, despite sharp economic and social disparities, it was not until 1950 that the Communist Party decided that a “revolutionary situation” existed. Communists in Malaya did not operate under Soviet guidance and drew more support from the Chinese community’s resentments than from ideology. The British High Commissioner, Malcolm McDonald, concluded in 1948 that there was “little sign” of Soviet activity in the region, noting that “if you suppress a nationalist severely enough, you find him tending to communism”.

In the US, the state played a bigger role in helping business than free-market zealots would like to admit, while the heritage of government research during the war acted as a catalyst for peacetime technological development.”

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Notes from Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather

August 7, 2021 – 8:28 pm

p. 6 “Every woman easired to own one. Watever your outlay, a plume would retain its value as an investment, as well as an adornment, kept wrapped in tissue in a box, clearned and re-curled once a year, then passed down to your daughter. Working girls saved up and clubbed together for a plume, taking it in turns to wear it on their best hat”.. In the early years of the trade, each feather had come from a wild bird, hunted down and killed in the Sahar Desert. But since ‘the Exlipse’ egg incubator was patented in 1864, ostrich farming in the arid Western Cape of southernmost Africa had taken off. Birds could not be raised in their hundreds and clipped or plucked every eight months or so, flooding the western market with so many plumes that it was hard to imagine there were enough heads left”

p.6-7 As demand for ‘plumiferous’ fashion accessories soared from the 1870s onwards, importers, brokers, auctioneers, wholesalers and feather handlers grew by the hundred. Most were concentrated around one tight area in the City of London, bordered by Aldersgate, London Wall, Bishopsgate and Old Street… the feathers would be shuttled through a cascade of treatments by Abraham Botibol’s workhands. They would be strung, dyed, washed, dyed again, dried, thrashed, trimmed, finished, parried, willowed, fashioned and curled. He might sell a single item to a millinery wholesale warehouse for 7 shillings, or direct to a customer for 30 shillings. Once attached to a ladies’ hat by a milliber and displayed in a Bond Street shop window, its value could be anything up to £5 (£500 in today’s money).

p. 37 Miss Maria Umphelby’s school for girls was filled with children who needed a substitute home or family. There were children of the British Empire, children of the Raj, orphaned children, girls somehow surplus to requirements when gentlemen fathers were widowed or remarried.Unlike the newer, more academic girls schools (North London Collegiate School, Cheltenham Ladies’ College), Hill House was run along an older, family0style model with no dormitories and many “siblings”. The 30 pupils, aged 6 to 16, all called Mrs Umphelby “Maimie”. She was the cloest to a monther most of them had.. a Revivalist Evangelical: a woman of 60 who infused her curriculum with the celebration of God’s glory. Countryside walks were done at the march while shouting out Revivalist hymns… it was hoped they would go on to become indomitable women, “a band of admirably trained daughters” who would “go forth over the wide world”. Missionary work – a home or abroad – was the unspoken subtext of their education.. Etta retuned to Blackheath aged 16 and was immediately sent abroad – to a finishing school in Lausanne… she remained impervious to the fashion manuals of the day, to the absurdly time-consuming ritual of the VIctorian ladies’ toilette and to those fashionable, constructing constumes. She returned at 18, proficient in French, to face an uncertain future.”

p. 52 “Particularly high prices were paid for the skins of unuaul birds, such as the King of Saxony bird-of-paradise, with its strange head wires, or Pesquet’s parrot, with its bright red chest feathers – both from the mountains of New Guinea… If a bird wasn’t, to a British lady, remotely familiar, then it had an otherworldly, innocent, storybook quality to it. It belonged to distant parts of the British Empire, which spooled like a nrightly coloured diorama through the Victorian mind. A bird-of-paradise, ascarlet tanager or tiny viridian hummingbird had no real back story. It wasn’t perceived as a specied with mating rituals, grooming habits, a distinctive call and hatchlings to feed. It was a commodity just liek any other – leather, ivory, tortoiseshell or ostrich feather.”


p. 84 George Frederick Watts – elderly and revered Royal Academician, considered by many to be the greatest artist of his day, produced a large, emotive oil known as The Shuddering Angel, dedicated ‘to all thos who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty”. Irridescent, lifeless plumage lies in a heap on a tombstone, over which an angel weeps, head in hands. The painting was exhibited in London’s New Callery in 1899 and caused an immediate sensation – warranting a leader in The Times.”

p. 147 “As the sun rose in the far distant Florida Everglades, a wearden on duty for the Audubon Society motored his little boat over still waters to confront a norotious egret hunter and his two sons. By the time he got near, the men were climbing back into their schooner, limp snowy egrets swinging from their hands. Guy Bradley shouted across the water that he was going to arrest them – and was shot at point blank range … Bradey’s murder made international headlines: America’s first martyr for the cause of bird protection. The same week … the playwright George Bernard Shaw took his seat at the Royal Opera House in Drury Lane for Puccini’s new opera, Madam Butterfly. He found himself behind a woman who was obscuring his view. “For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its hreast, and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to hear th operation. I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person but the spectacle sickened me.”

p. 148 To many eyes, such preposterous headgear undermined the thinking woman. It made her look unconsidered, even stupid. What price emancipation if she remained enslaved by fashion. .. I was curious about the future lives of these Edwardian women, helplessly in thrall to the surface of things, and was surprised to discover that many of Fabbircotti’s customers went on to do extraordinary, brave and adventurous things, spurred on by the First World War. Of course, they were facilitated by huge private incomes. But these were not mere featherheads. On Thursday 3 May 1906, Mrs Asquith – brilliant wit and socialite, second wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer – was drawn irresistibly into the boutique on South Molton Steet and spent £2 17s (around £280 in today’s money). Two months later, she was back again, buying millinery worth £4 4s (around £415). Tall, big boned, with a long determined face, Margot Asquith understood the power of a good hat. “Clothes are the first thing that catch the eye,” she was fond of saying. Having absolutely no compunction about wearing feathers, Margot was painted by society portraitist Philip de Laszlo with a large dead bird on her head. The painting was commissioned in 1909 to mark her powerful new role as the Prime Minister’s wife.”

p. 287 “Among the many who gained from the campaign for the vote, it was particularly satisfying to discover that that Alice Battershall’s daughter Louisa, a feather worker like her mother, was also to benefit. Thanks to determined suffragist Clementina Black and her investigative team at the Women’s Industrial Council, a government trade board was created in 1919 for the oxtrich, fancy feather and artificial flower industry. A minimum wage was set, working hours monitored and basic comforts introduced. And in 1927, A Botibol and Coomapny, “the biggest in the feather trade”, was thoroughly investigated for emplower abused. Abraham’s son, Cecil, was found guilty of underpaying 27 of his 50 female employees and of keeping no wage records. Forced to pay £234 in arrears and £17 in fines (around £40,000 in today’s money), he threw up his hands and admitted that he deserved “to lose on all points”.

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Podcast: Women in China today

August 6, 2021 – 11:29 am

Fascinating, and oh so familiar, account of the gendered pressures on women in China today. Get a degree, get a career job – but not _too_ good a job that will make too many demands on your time, get a husband by age 27, otherwise you’re at risk of being seen as “on the shelf”.

As the writer of Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations, Kailing Xie, who’s lived this experience herself says in a fascina, this is a very narrow window. And “marrying up” is still expected, which narrows the pool of potential husbands greatly.

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